Friday, August 17, 2007

Would students be safer if they carried guns?Gun safety questions still linger four months after the VA Tech shootings

On April 17, four months ago today, a major university and a nation stood still in an attempt to understand the devastation that was levied by one angry man with two guns. That morning, 23-year-old Virginia Tech senior Cho Seung-Hui killed 33 and wounded 29 in an act of rage that still defies explanation. In the aftermath of those killings, many thought to themselves, “If only someone could have stopped him sooner…”You have to read the following to realize the mindless logic of the anti-gun crowd.Notwithstanding the slaughter at Tech, the murder rate on college campuses is 0.28 per 100,000 people, far less than the overall U.S. murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000. This means that a non-student is at least 20 times more likely to be a murder victim than a student at college.

Well gee, that is reassuring!?Students need to fight for their ideas and beliefs, ones honed over the blazing fires of verbal discourse and debate. But their fight should be with words, not bullets.